The Mummy (16 page)

Chamberlin nodded. Their guide was an untrustworthy scoundrel, but his advice was sound.

“I think perhaps we should let the
fellahin
have this rare honor,” Chamberlin said. “We are guests in their native land, after all.”

“Listen to the good doctor,” Burns said to Henderson.

But Henderson, crowbar in his now limp hands, was already convinced. “Yeah, sure . . . let them have the pleasure.”

Chamberlin found Daniels the most mercurial of the group, brooding and dangerous. So it was no surprise when Daniels turned to the diggers and snarled, “You heard the man—get your asses over there!”

The diggers, exchanging wide-eyed expressions of alarm amongst themselves, backed away, murmuring their dissent.

“Mr. Daniels,” Chamberlin said, “no disrespect meant, but you have the social skills of a drill sergeant. This is a delicate matter—one must reason with these men.”

Chamberlin stepped forward and, screaming at the top of his lungs, told the diggers, in their own tongue, that if three of them did not step forward at once, he would invoke an ancient curse that would shrivel all of them, and every member of their families, to a desiccated death.

A hushed moment allowed the diggers to take that in.

Then three of the turbaned natives stepped forward, heads lowered, crowbars in hand, and lumbered reluctantly forward, while the other diggers backed away, cowering. Chamberlin directed them as to where precisely the tips of their crowbars should be inserted, around the seams of the panel at the statue’s base.

As the diggers were poised to pry, Beni took several steps backward; Henderson noticed this, and followed suit—and then so did Burns and Daniels. This amused Chamberlin—the hardbitten soldiers of fortune were every bit as fearful as the simple natives.

Chamberlin stood to one side and shouted,
“Feni!”

And the three diggers tugged back with their crowbars.

Sighing, the professor told them, in their own tongue, to put some damn muscle into it, again yelling,
“Feni!”

The three men tugged harder, and the ancient stone panel seemed to give, somewhat.

“Feni!”

The diggers tugged at the crowbars again, putting their backs into it. The panel seemed to be loosening . . .

“Feni!”

And this time the diggers put every ounce of strength into their effort, and the seam widened to a good half an inch . . .

. . . and an intense stream of liquid sprayed out from all around the seams, drenching the three diggers!

The three men screamed, each at a different pitch, creating a shrill chorus of anguish and horror as the acid bath stripped their clothes from their bodies, and then the flesh from their sinew, like melting candle wax, their corpses half-skeletal before they even had time to fall to the stone floor.

The remaining diggers had long since run off, their own cries echoing through the labyrinth as Chamberlin, the fortune hunters, and their guide—who had backed well away so none of them had even been touched by a drop of the deadly spray—gazed in horrified amazement at the steaming piles of bones that lay strewn at the base of the statue, whose compartment had sealed itself tightly shut, once again.

The tough Americans were white with fright; Beni was covering his eyes, trembling so severely his knees were knocking.

“Interesting,” Chamberlin said, rubbing his chin. “What say, gentlemen? Shall we move on?”

O’Connell chipped away at the ceiling of the chamber with his chisel, Jonathan, beside him, was doing the same. Evelyn—who was holding the torch—wasn’t quite tall enough to join in, and since there was nothing for her to stand upon, she was in the process of sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm about ancient Egypt and the practice of mummification.

“The ancient Egyptians believed in the transmigration of souls,” she was saying. “The spirit might wander for thousands of years after death, and finally come back to its home on earth, looking to re-enter his or her body. Therefore, the body needed to be kept intact.”

O’Connell kept chiseling. “And wrapping your body up in bandages does that, huh?”

“Oh, that’s just a small part of the process. The intestines are removed through an incision in the side, then cleaned and washed in palm wine, covered with aromatic gum, and stored in jewel-encrusted jars; same with kidneys, liver, lungs. The heart was removed in the case of those who’d been . . . naughty. The body cavity was filled with cassia, myrrh, and other aromatic spices, then sewn up and soaked in, well . . . a sort of carbonate of soda for forty days. Only then would the fine linen bandages be wrapped around the mummy.”

O’Connell glanced at her. “Did they leave the brain in the body?”

“Oh! Did I forget the brain? The brains were extracted by means of a sharp, red-hot iron probe . . .”

Jonathan winced as he chipped. “This is more information than we really require, dear sister.”

“. . . which they stuck up one’s nose, cutting the brain into sections, which were then removed through the nostrils.”

“That’s got to smart,” O’Connell said.

Evelyn smirked. “It doesn’t smart at all, silly. Mummification was strictly for the dead.”

“That process could wake the dead.”

“It would certainly get my attention,” Jonathan said.

She rolled her eyes. “You’re such schoolboys. Any progress?”

And, as if in answer to her question, a big chunk of the roof fell out, right between O’Connell and Jonathan, a huge slab of stone that shattered into a thousand pieces as O’Connell dove out of its path, pulling Evelyn along with him, while Jonathan leaped the opposite way.

They were still scrambling, in their respective directions, when through this hole in the ceiling dropped a massive granite object, which—accompanied by shower of rubble—came crashing down to the floor with a slam that rocked the chamber, turning pebbles to dust that filled the air like fog.

Coughing, picking themselves up gingerly, blinded by the sudden dust storm, the three moved tentatively toward the object, O’Connell plucking the still-lit torch from the floor, where Evelyn had dropped it.

“Now that was a crash to wake the dead,” Jonathan said.

“You may be closer than you think,” Evelyn said, as in the light of the torch she got her look at what was clearly a man-made object, a massive granite casement.

“What the hell is it?” O’Connell asked.

“A sarcophagus,” she said. The dust was clearing. “Buried in the shadow of Anubis, at the feet of the god. Whoever this was must have been a personage of great importance.”

“They honored him in death, you think?”

She shrugged. “Either that, or he needed keeping-an-eye-on by the gods. Perhaps he’d been very . . .”

“Naughty?” her brother offered. “Shall we look inside and see if he’s got a heart?”

“Help me dust this off,” she said, and from the backpacks of the two men came rags, and soon a single hieroglyph had been revealed on the lid of the sarcophagus.

Though it seemed to O’Connell that this was a rather simple hieroglyph (not that he had any idea what it meant), Evelyn stared at the thing for the longest time, her expression developing into a sort of stricken look.

Jonathan was drumming his fingers impatiently on the stone lid. “Well? Who is he? King Somebody, or just the royal gardener?”

She seemed confused, concerned; finally she said, “It says . . . ‘He Who Shall Not Be Named.’ ”

“Perhaps a very bad gardener,” Jonathan put in.

“This looks like quarried granite.” O’Connell was using a rag to clean off what seemed to be a huge lock.

“Yes,” she said, “and it’s likely to have a copper lining.”

“If he was such an important chap,” Jonathan said, “mightn’t the inner coffin be solid gold, like Tut?”

“Possibly,” Evelyn conceded.

“Without a key,” O’Connell said, sighing, shaking his head, “it’ll take us a month to crack this thing and find out.”

Evelyn’s eyes widened and she snapped her fingers. “That’s it—the key! Don’t you see? That’s what the Med-jai on the boat were looking for, that fiend with the hook! He asked me for the key!”

“Of course,” Jonathan said, brightening, “the puzzle box! He was after my bloody puzzle thingamajig!”

Evelyn plucked the golden box from her brother’s backpack and quickly unfolded the object until its jagged petals revealed themselves as an oversize key shaped precisely like the keyhole of the sarcophagus lock.

Excited smiles blossomed all around, accompanied by several long moments of breathless anticipation, as O’Connell and Jonathan, on either side of Evelyn, watched her approach the granite casement with the bulky key poised for insertion.

But the historic moment was interrupted by an unearthly, agonized scream that came echoing up to them from the labyrinth, clearly the cries of someone in desperate trouble.

Evelyn quickly folded the box back up, tossed it to Jonathan, who snugged it into his backpack, as O’Connell snatched the torch from the young woman’s hand and led them into the tunnels, in search of whoever it was that needed their help.

They entered an area where the tunnel widened into a small cavern and the screams seemed to be running toward them, so they paused, waiting, and then there he was:
Warden Hassan!

The plump warden emerged from a passageway, doing a demented dance, eyes popping, clawing at his head, literally tearing clumps of hair from his scalp.

“Grab him!” O’Connell said to Jonathan, and soon both men had hold of his arms, pulling his hands away from where fingers of frenzy were ripping at his hair.

But the warden, crazed by pain, managed to shove both would-be helpers off, hurling them aside, not breaking stride as, screaming like an attacking horde of Tuaregs, Hassan ran headlong across the cavern . . .

. . . and smacked into the rock, like a car hitting a telephone pole.

Then Hassan just stood there, for a moment, giving Evelyn the chance to gasp in horror before he fell, flopping onto his back, staring at the rocky ceiling with wide-open, unseeing eyes.

“Jesus!” O’Connell said.

Evelyn had clasped a hand over her mouth.

“What got into him?” Jonathan wondered.

O’Connell went over and knelt to take Hassan’s pulse, then closed the man’s eyes, and stood.

“City of Dead’s claimed another resident,” he said.

Evelyn turned away, weeping, and O’Connell and Jonathan exchanged troubled glances.

Which was why none of them noticed the blood-soaked beetle slither out of the late warden’s ear and into the darkness.

 
11
 

Night Visitors

N
ight’s star-studded sapphire shroud had descended upon the City of the Dead, moonlight painting the partial pillars and crumbling walls of Hamanaptra a chalky ivory. The two camps set up within its fragmentary walls were as far away from each other as possible. The Americans with their larger contingency, a city of tents with a roaring bonfire, made a pitiful suburb of the four pup tents of the Carnahan group, whose small campfire consisted of brush O’Connell had gathered,
vissigia
and
siveeda,
and palm tree twigs and branches he’d loaded up on, back at the Bedouin oasis.

When O’Connell returned from burying Hassan, he found Evelyn and her brother huddled near the small, crackling fire.

Evelyn looked up at O’Connell, who tossed his shovel near his ever-handy gunnysack arsenal, and asked him, “What do you suppose killed the poor man?”

“Maybe it was something he ate,” Jonathan said dryly.

The little group was well aware of the late warden’s repellent eating habits.

“Or something that ate him,” O’Connell said, sitting beside the young woman. This remark made both Evelyn and Jonathan look at him curiously. “He had a wound on his foot that looked like an animal bite.”

“Snake perhaps?” Jonathan wondered.

“Not sure. It was a fairly small bite, but the wound was deep—my finger couldn’t find the end of it.”

Evelyn shuddered, gathering her folded arms closer and tighter to her breasts. “I saw you talking to the Americans. Have we made peace?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” O’Connell said. “But they’re not as cocky as before They had a sobering experience of their own today, their own tragedy.”